Response to the film was positive, with much praise going to the performances of Watts, McGregor and newcomer Holland. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a score of 81% based on reviews from 183 reviews with an average score of 7.3 out of 10. The consensus states "The screenplay isn't quite as powerful as the direction or the acting, but with such an astonishing real-life story at its centre, The Impossible is never less than compelling."[19] At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film had an average score of 73, based on 42 reviews, which indicates "generally favourable reviews."[20]